Moments In Crime

One of the best things my work has earned me is the Danamaniacs. Don’t blame me, they named themselves. The Danamaniacs started out on stabenow.com, and when they got so they were taking over every blessed page decided they needed their own website. They’re a group of (so far) 400 rambunctious fans who know more about the Kate Shugak series than I do, and no, that’s not me being even remotely facetious. They play a Kate trivia game on their website and half the time I can’t answer the questions. They are also the first to point out, not without a certain amount of glee, when, say, a certain character’s height changes from book to book. They chat several times a year, including the month a new book comes out, when I join them. Every now and then they put together a list of questions and submit them to me to answer, and post the results on their website. Lest you think they are so dull as to only discuss my books, not so, and they invite other authors to chat as well, like Julia Spencer-Fleming. They’re managed by a Gang of Four, CathyO in California, Caroline in Detroit, CathyR in Kentucky, and Sandy in Boston. I’ve met them all and a smarter, funnier, more enjoyable group it would be hard to imagine. That they like my books is an enormous compliment. The general membership is a hoot, too. They take photos of themselves holding up my books in front of Antarctica and Old Faithful. They made me a quilt. We went on a hike together at the Las Vegas Bouchercon and had a party at the Anchorage Bouchercon. I try to make sure that the ‘maniacs are the first to know any real news, as in excerpts posted to my website, pub dates and author appearances. I posted a link to “the Kate Shugak series (abridged)” video on YouTube (an abbreviated video introduction to the Kate Shugak series, you could call it Kateology) to their website before I posted it to my own. Note: Their website is on Microsoft Groups, which is standing down this month, so the ‘maniacs are using the time to take a break, regroup and we all hope reappear somewhere else on the Internet later in the year. They have already started their own page on Facebook. Meanwhile, they’re still chatting on Chatzy. I’ll be chatting with them on March 3 at 5pm Alaska/9pm Eastern. "Stabenow" is the password to get into the room. How cool is that?

I love reading series. It’s like dropping in on friends uninvited and being made welcome anyway. How much trouble is Falco’s dad going to get them all into this time? What’s up with Joe and Jim on the Rez? What the hell, Vic’s doing time? What’s that about? One of the things about series fiction I’m most alert to is how each author works in the backstory. If you’re fifteen books into a series, there is bound to be a lot of backstory, and as an editor once told me when I tried to leave out Kate’s past history, “Welcome to the world of genre fiction, Dana.” You can’t drop a new reader into the middle of an ongoing fictional voyage without a pole star by which to navigate. This leads to what is called “the expository lump,” and the writer’s (sorry, author’s) job is to make that lump as palatable and as digestible as possible. For example. There is always and ever an expository lump in the Kate Shugak series when the story involves Alaskan land issues. Land issues have been at the heart of many of the plotlines, beginning with A Cold Day for Murder, and there is just no way around the linear explanation. It has to be there to make sense of the story. All too often it is essential to explain motive. The best I can do is make Kate’s head hurt when she thinks about said land issues, as much as mine does when I’m writing them and yours probably does when you’re reading about them. One of the ways you can get around the expository lump is to have a character other than the main character fill you in. As most of you already know, Hunter’s Moon ends on a major change in Kate’s life. In the next book, Midnight Come Again, I let Chopper Jim take over the narrative for the first seventy pages. You get the 411 on Kate through his eyes, which has the added benefit of moving him center stage.

I once wrote that when you put four Alaskans in a room, you have five marriages, six divorces, and seven political parties. Just because I was making a joke doesn’t mean I wasn’t telling the truth, too. Alaska embraces contradiction as a way of life. For example. We pride ourselves on our independence. We hate the federal government only slightly less than we hate the state government. This is interesting, since Alaskans receive more federal dollars per capita than any other state. About 34 percent of Alaskans are employed by the federal government. There is a reason for this. Over 60 percent of Alaska is federally owned. Before statehood in 1959, before ANCSA in 1972, before ANILCA in 1979, it was over 90 percent federally owned. More specifically? If you are an American citizen, YOU own it. Your tax dollars go toward supporting the national parks, forests and wildlife refuges here. The federal government is our biggest employer, especially after you add in the army bases, the two air force bases, Elmendorf and Eielson, and the large Coast Guard presence. We live here, so of course we look at that ownership a little differently. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, after all. We got attitude. You talking to us? We’re the only ones actually living here, so you must be talking to us. Of course, the election just past notwithstanding, almost no one ever is, which leads to a feeling of inferiority, which engenders even more ‘tude. And that ‘tude is at the heart of Kate Shugak’s character. You, Dear Reader, forget that at your peril.

My two first published novels were science fiction, Second Star and A Handful of Stars, about Star Svensdotter, an off-Earther building a habitat at Ellfive and a mining colony in the Asteroid Belt. I had a third novel planned for the series but I was exhausted from the research required to make nuts-and-bolts science fiction sound credible, so I decided to take a rest from sf by writing a crime novel. It’s not as nuts as it sounds. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to publish it or anything. It was just for practice, to keep my writing muscle exercised while I took some time off from the Star novels. I’d been reading a lot of crime fiction novels, Ellis Peters, P.D. James, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and I thought, “I wonder if I could write a crime novel.” I set parameters. I couldn’t do any research, if I couldn’t find it between my own ears or in the Alaska Almanac Book of Facts I couldn’t use it. The Park is based on the Wrangell-St. Elias Park because I’d just been there, helping my aunt move down to Cordova. The heroine would be an Aleut because I was raised with Aleuts, and she was a woman because I am, too, and it’s always easier to write in the voice of your own gender. In short, this was the lazy woman’s way to write a mystery. I was housesitting for a friend on the Big Island at the time, and I wrote at a card table on his lanai. Five months later, I had about 300 manuscript pages, imaginatively titled “Mystery.” It wasn’t awful, so instead of deleting it I put it on a floppy disk and went to work on Red Planet Run, the third novel in the Star series. A couple of years later I sold the first Star book and my editor at the time said, “So, what else have you got?”

Excuse me, according to no less an authority than the bellhop at the Vintage Hotel in Portland, Oregon, whose acquaintance I made in the elevator during my first book tour, if you are published, you’re not a writer, you’re an author. Okay. “Becoming an author.” When I graduated from high school I thought I was going to be a journalist. I figured ten years, fifteen, tops, to managing editor of the New York Times.

The strongest motivating factor was that I was sure I’d get free tickets to Broadway openings. Unfortunately, by the time I got my BA in journalism from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I knew I had no ability to ask the hard question. So, not journalism, then. What? Well, how about I screw around for as long as humanly possible working at a salmon cannery, on the TransAlaska Pipeline and on the North Slope? Okay. I was having a pretty good time, working for BP and making what at the time was a hell of a lot of money, falling in love and discovering the illicit joys of nude bathing in Hawaii, when fate intervened in the form of a car wreck in which I almost died. This got my attention. I went back to school, got my MFA, and practiced writing until I wrote a novel that was publishable. Piece of cake.

My editor told me to make this blog more about me than about the book. With all the stuff out there (I’ve got a website, I review books on Amazon, I’ve got my reading list on Goodreads, I’m on Facebook, I’m on YouTube), I can’t believe everyone doesn’t already know everything there is to know about me, but okay, here's some floating factoids you may have missed.

I’m an American but I wasn’t born in a state. My parents split up when I was six months old and I didn’t meet my father again until I was fourteen when my mother sent me to Anchorage to go to the dentist.

I spent five years of my childhood off and on a 75-foot fish tender called the Celtic. My oldest and dearest friend is half-Aleut half-Filipino, and any time I wasn’t on the Celtic I was at her house. I didn’t know I was white until I went away to college. My back yard was off the stern of the Celtic, Kachemak Bay, Cook Inlet, and Prince William Sound. Even then I knew how staggeringly beautiful it was. I have never taken where I grew up for granted. There were 5 people in my graduating class in Seldovia High School, and that included me. There’s a background you’ll ever see in a Steven Spielberg movie.

Blogging This Week: Dana Stabenow

Dana Stabenow, a New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner, is the author of sixteen Kate Shugak mysteries, four Liam Campbell mysteries, three science fiction novels, and two thrillers, and she also freelances for Alaska magazine. She was born, raised, and lives in Alaska, where she was awarded the Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities in 2007.

Inside Alaska’s biggest national park, around the town of Niniltna, a gold mining company has started buying up land. The residents of the Park are uneasy. “But gold is up to nine hundred dollars an ounce” is the refrain of Talia Macleod, the popular Alaskan skiing champ the company has hired to improve their relations with Alaskans and pave the way for the mine’s expansion. And she promises much-needed jobs to the locals.

But before she can make her way to every village in the area to present her case at town meetings and village breakfasts, there are two brutal murders, including that of a long-standing mine opponent. The investigation into those deaths falls to Trooper Jim Chopin and, as usual, he needs Kate to help him get to the heart of the matter.

Between those deaths and a series of attacks on snowmobilers up the Kanuyaq River, not to mention the still-open homicide of Park villain Louis Deem last year, part-time P.I. and newly elected chairman of the Niniltna Native Association Kate Shugak has her hands very much full.

Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series continues to be beloved among crime fiction fans, but also provides a fascinating window into life and death in Alaska.

author sightings

Here's where I'll be doing what in conjunction with the publication of Prepared for Rage:

February 12
online chat with the Danamaniacs, 5pmAST/9pmEST

February 14
Twice Told Tales, Anchorage
stock signing, 12noon

February 15
Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale
7pm, with Diana Gabaldon

February 21
Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Seattle
10am stock signing

February 21
Title Wave, Anchorage
7pm

March 1
Next Page Bookstore, Kodiak
1pm

And here are a couple of reviews to whet your appetite:

The action of Edgar-winner Stabenow’s stellar second venture into thriller territory, in contrast to 2006’s Blindfold Game, which was set largely in the frozen waters off Alaska, centers on the warm seas of the Florida coast near the Kennedy Space Center, where the latest space shuttle launch is to take place. Stabenow harnesses the strands of her story with consummate skill: the passion that propels a rogue terrorist on a crusade to strike a blow that will shatter American pride; the efforts of U.S. intelligence to thwart a bewildering array of foes; the rising careers of Capt. Cal T. Schuyler, “the golden boy of the U.S. Coast Guard,” and astronaut Kenai Munro, whose life ambition is realized when she’s named to the shuttle crew. Stabenow proves equally adept at portraying the workings of a cutter, the complexities of a shuttle mission or the machinations of a terrorist. The result is entertainment and suspense of a high order.  --Publisher's Weekly, 12/5/07

Brutal tribal injustice motivates a Western-educated Pakistani to compete with Osama bin Laden as a terror theorist, targeting America’s space shuttle.
An incendiary string of U.S. policy failures fuels this frightening, tightly written thriller by Stabenow (A Deeper Sleep, 2007, etc.). Akil, the Muslim villain at the story’s heart, is no Islamic fundamentalist. He is, rather, a smallish man with a very big grudge against the American enablers of Pakistan’s corrupt government. Akil firmly believes that the refusal of Western-backed authorities to rein in tribal leaders was responsible for the revenge killing of his beloved sister. That’s sufficient motivation for him to enlist with the forces of bin Laden’s great rival Musab al-Zarqawi, proving himself so loyal and effective as a terrorist that he becomes Zarqawi’s No. 2 man. When the Americans kill his mentor, Akil elects to operate independently, taking as his nom de guerre Isa, Arabic for Jesus. Using skills acquired in years as an employee of Western banks, he keeps Zarqawi’s fortune out of bin Laden’s hands, using it to build a cadre he will wield personally in his quest to humiliate America. The space shuttle that is his target counts among its crew members Kenai Munro, a sexy and smart Alaskan aviator whose parents will watch the launch from a Coast Guard cutter captained by Kenai’s equally capable lover, Cal Schuyler. Akil is able to elude both the Americans and bin Laden’s lieutenants, who are under orders to render him ineffective. When Akil starts to make errors, dedicated CIA officer Patrick Chisum begins to pick up his scent, and the Coast Guard is very much on the job.
Taut and alarming.  --Kirkus, December

And a Danamaniac weighs in:

I just finished PFR 5 minutes ago.  This is a wonderfully
plotted, scary thriller.  If Blindfold Game made the best seller list,
this one will too.  BFG had "Dana" in it, a dash here a dash there.  PFR is
just crazy wild and other than Kenai and Alaska, this book has it's own
identity. Is that good?  I think so.  But what do I know. This is just hot damn good.
You know how to write.  Keep up the good work!
     --Sandy, one of four 'maniacs managers (and the one who named them)

Today's photos are from last year's book tour, three of what I see, at Elliott Bay Book Company and Powell's and Seattle Mystery Bookshop, and one of what you see.

It's been fun blogging here this week, my thanks to Minotaur for making it happen.  For future news as it happens, subscribe to my newsletter and check out my website which is also in blog format and where you can ask questions and leave comments.

Thanks to everyone for reading and leaving comments!  See you soon, on line or in the bookstore--

Dana

excerpt from Prepared for Rage

Since I spent all week talking about my new book, Prepared for Rage, I figured I'd better give you a little taste.  So just for you, Moments in Crime folks, a tiny excerpt.  Enjoy!

-----------------------------------------------

[Astronaut Kenai Munro is the designated babysitter for a surprise guest on her shuttle mission.]

A week later, the sheik in question arrived for an introductory visit. He looked like Disney’s Aladdin, only older and more arrogant, and from the first he proved to be labor intensive. Kenai was right, he wasn’t happy with a woman as his partner, and he said so. Joel, to his credit, ignored his hints that someone of the sheik’s stature in the Islamic community and his family connections and their immense wealth and political profile and blah blah blah really ought to be taken in tow by the mission’s commander. 

Joel was probably afraid of what Rick would do to him if he did, for good reason. Rick did not suffer fools gladly, and people who inflicted fools upon him had been known to rue the day, if not resign on the spot.

The sheik had various other concerns, usually delivered to Kenai in an imperious voice as he looked down his very long nose. For one thing, he had seen photos of previous crews in space and he’d noticed that often the crew was wearing shorts. He trusted Kenai would not be orbiting the earth half naked.

Kenai exchanged a glance with Laurel, who happened to be loitering within earshot. “I’m sorry, sir, I just assumed...”

“Assumed what?” the sheik said loftily.

“That you had been briefed.” She did her best to look as if she were reluctant to be the one to bring him the bad news. “This mission...”

His brow puckered. “Yes?”

“Well, sir, this mission will be accomplished totally in the nude.”

-----------------------------------------------

There is another, longer excerpt here.

You can pre-order a copy from Amazon here.

-----------------------------------------------

 

tomorrow:  author sightings, or where you can get your copy of Prepared for Rage signed.

patrick chisum, the CIA and me

I'm pretty rational when it comes to the CIA.  I think everyone who works there ought to be fired and the headquarters at Langley should be burned to the ground. 

And then we sow the ground with salt.

See what I mean?  Rational.

So now you wanna know why, right?  Okay, I'll tell you why, but only because you asked.

I'm a member of the Me Generation, a dyed-in-the-wool Baby Boomer, but because I grew up in Alaska, I missed out on Woodstock, the 1968 Democratic convention, Kent State, all of it.  Sure, I was against the Vietnam War, I was for the right to choose and women's rights in general, I was appalled by Richard Nixon and Watergate--in short, I subscribed to many of the ideas and the ideals of my fellow Boomers (look at that, we're so full of ourselves we're even a proper noun now), but it was all happening so far away.  I mean, I read Gloria Steinem but I don't think I really knew what the word "radicalized" meant.

And then came the Church hearings.  That's Frank Church, D-Idaho, the senator who chaired the 1975-76 congressional look into what the CIA had been doing overseas over the past decades. Trying to kill Castro with exploding cigars?  And getting into bed with the Mafia to do it?  Sponsoring the coup d'etat that resulted in Allende's assassination?  Training Savak for the Shah of Iran, are you kidding me?

I was out of school by then, working and paying taxes.  Now I knew where those tax dollars were going when we sent them overseas, and it wasn't to roads and bridges and hospitals and schools.

Okay, now I knew what radicalized meant. 

And it doesn't help that in the years since the CIA has validated my opinion of them over and over again.  No clue and therefore no warning the Berlin Wall was going to come down, catching Bush I flatfooted and unprepared to accede to the Ukraine's request for the US to remove the Russian nukes there.  WMD in Iraq?  Uh-huh.  Iraq sponsoring al Queda?  Not then, but you can bet money on it now.  I think I'd rather give the US Air Force $900 for another toilet seat than the CIA one more dollar for US  state-sponsored terrorism.  Oh, I'm sorry, did I say that?  You bet I did.

Whew.  Okay, there, I feel better.

So somebody please tell me:  How the hell did Patrick Chisum, the CIA desk man in Prepared for Rage and the guy who finally figures it all out, turn out to be such a likeable character?  He's short, pudgy, balding, he dresses like Willy Loman, he's a by-the-book career bureaucrat, and he can't even muster up enough oomph to make a move on his obviously willing secretary.  And he works for the CIA!  How can I possibly like this guy so much?

It's one of those felicitous mysteries in this writing life, when the character takes on a life of his own, and the outline goes out the window.

Thanks for showing up, Patrick.

-------------------------------------

tomorrow: an excerpt from Prepared for Rage